Poe’s “The Business Man”: Its Contexts and Satire of Franklin’s Autobiography

J. A. Leo Lemay

University of Delaware

In his splendidly annotated Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ollive Mabbott claims that “The Business
Man‘‘(1) was generally understood as “a deliberate parody” of Joseph C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches, a
series of tales humorously and sympathetically portraying low-life urban characters, who often have alliterative names. Two of
Neal’s sketches satirize indigent poets and writers, and one of them, “Undeveloped Genius: A Passage in the Life of P.
Pilgarlick Pigwiggen,” even describes Poe’s typical dress.(2) Since Neal implies that indigent writers should abandon their
efforts and turn to business, Poe may have intended his satirical sketch of the businessman as a reply to Neal. Poe had contrasted the
artist with the businessman as early as 1836: “When shall the artist assume his proper situation in society — in a
society of thinking beings? How long shall he be enslaved? How long shall the veriest vermin of the Earth, who crawl around the altar of
Mammon, be more esteemed of men than they, the gifted ministers to those exalted emotions which link us with the mysteries of
Heaven?” (Complete Works, VII, 230). But Poe’s parody of Neal was general rather than specific and was deliberately
weakened when he revised the story in 1835.

Mabbott also has pointed out that Poe borrowed the name Peter Pendulum (which he used in the title of the 1840 version)
from Joseph Dennie’s “Peter Pendulum,” an essay that appeared in the Farmer’s Weekly Museum for 10 April
1798 with its author’s acknowledgment that he had published it before. In 1801, Dennie reprinted it again in The Spirit of the
Farmer’s Weekly Museum.(3) As this early Peter Pendulum goes “from one pursuit to another,” Dennie traces his
flighty religious and philosophical opinions, then his changing occupations (ministry, law, medicine, literature, and business), and
finally his fickle love affairs. Although Dennie warns against instability, he ends with Peter Pendulum a happy man because he has
become “settled and regular in business.” Since Dennie does not prepare for the final change in Peter Pendulum, I [column
2:] presume that Poe found Dennie’s happy ending absurdly primitive and Dennie himself overrated. At any rate, in the 1840
version of Poe’s story, the flighty, scoundrelly Peter Pendulum is, Poe implies, the kind of successful businessman that
Dennie’s Peter Pendulum would have become. When Poe revised the story in 1845, he dropped the Peter Pendulum allusions, perhaps
because Dennie hardly seemed worth satirizing.

No one has pointed out, however, that the main satiric context for Poe’s “The Business Man” was
neither Neal’s stories nor Dennie’s sketch, but Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, especially Part Two, the
much maligned Art of Virtue,(4) the satiric use of which, as I shall point out below, was strengthened in Poe’s 1845 revision. The
reductio ad absurdum of the Art of Virtue in “The Business Man” portrays Franklin’s practical advice on
conduct and discipline as the philosophy of a scoundrel who prides himself on being a methodical businessman. Peter Proffit, the low
crook who is the protagonist-persona of “The Business Man,” is a version of Franklin — the Franklin deified as the
progenitor, model, and patron saint of American materialistic society. Poe’s achievement in his sketch can be fully appreciated
only when one realizes that the urban, low-life swindler so remarkably and viciously self-revealed is, in fact, a splendid satirical
epitome of that emerging cultural ideal of American middle-class society — the self-made, wealthy businessman.(5) Poe wrote in his
Marginalia, “In looking at the world as it is, we shall find it folly to deny that, to worldly success, a surer path is
Villainy than Virtue. What the Scriptures mean by the ‘leaven of unrighteousness’ is that leaven by which men rise”
(Complete Works, XVI, 162) . Although Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne had previously used Franklin’s
Autobiography as a satiric literary touchstone for the idea of rising in the world, neither was as vicious as Poe. Perhaps Poe,
not D. H. Lawrence, should be credited with writing the most savage indictment of Franklin’s Autotoiography; however that
may be, “The Business Man” should certainly be recognized as one of the cruelest burlesques of antebellum American
materialism.(6)

I

Although the commercial ethic emerged as an avant-garde intellectual philosophy during the eighteenth centuury, the popular
ideals (even in America) were still dominantly those of a hierarchical, aristocratic, and feudal society.(7) During the early decades of
the nineteenth century, the [page 30:] businessman emerged as a hero and an ideal
in American society. The word businessman itself seems first to have been used in 1826, but it was not uncommon during the
1830’s.(8) Even in the colonial period, Americans prided themselves as especially sharp traders — a reputation that existed
in the Southern and Middle colonies as well as among the Yankees.(9) By the Jacksonian period, the continued expansion of the United
States, both demographically and geographically, together with industrialization and new, speedy possibilities for the mass distribution
of goods, caused a boom in the numbers of entrepreneurs and businessmen, as well as a rise in their reputation.(10) In the 1820’s,
mercantile library associations were organized in most major American cities. The ones in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were
especially active, sponsoring lectures on such topics as “What Constitutes a Merchant” and “Commerce as a Liberal
Pursuit.‘‘(11)

By 1839, Poe’s friend Freeman Hunt judged that businessmen were so numerous and so well identified as a group
that a magazine aimed specifically at their interests would be successful. It was. Although Hunt published a “large edition”
of the first volume of his Merchants’ Magazine, the run was exhausted well before June of 1840 when he announced a
reprinting.(12) Hunt claimed in his introduction to the July 1839 issue that Americans were “essentially and practically a trading
people” and that commerce was a “science . . . calculated to elevate the mind, and enlarge the
understanding.” A primary purpose of his magazine was “to raise and elevate the commercial character.” Hunt believed
that business was “now the most honorable pursuit in which a man of talent and enterprise can engage.” He wanted to inspire
young men to take up careers in business because “commerce is now the lever of Archimedes and the fulcrum which he wanted to move
the world.” He claimed that businessmen “now determine the questions of peace or war, and decide the destinies of
nations” (pp. 9- 10) .

Like the newspapers of the time, Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine carried anecdotes praising individual
businessmen and devoted biographical sketches to deceased ones.(13) Furthermore, biographies and autobiographies of successful merchants
began appearing in the 1830’s, as did books of instruction for The Young Merchant.(14) Religious discourses celebrated
commerce, and directories were published giving businessmen’s names, addresses, and specialties.(15) The epitaph of Samuel Polk
(d. 1827), the father of President James K. Polk, splendidly encapsulates antebellum respect for the businessman and entrepreneur:
“MEN OF ENTERPRISE — HERE MOULDER THE MORTAL REMAINS OF A KINDRED SPIRIT.‘‘(16)

The phenomenon of the businessman fascinated both American and foreign intellectuals. Mrs. Trollope aristocratically
disparaged American society for its materialism: “Nothing can exceed their [Americans’] activity and perseverence in all
kinds of speculation, handicraft, and enterprise, which promises a profitable pecuniary result.‘‘(17) Tocqueville analyzed
the phenomenon in the 1830’s. Farmers, he said, could only grow wealthy “little by little and [column 2:] with
toil,” but trade and industry offered “the quickest and best means” for Americans to get rich. In aristocratic
countries, disparaging attitudes toward trade and commerce often prevented their citizens from going into business, but in democratic
countries and particularly in America, Tocqueville found just the opposite — “nothing has brighter luster than
commerce.” Not only did business attract “the attention of the public,” it even filled “the imagination of the
crowd.” The rich as well as the poor loved enterprise “for the sake of promised gain” and especially for “the
emotions it provides.‘‘(18) Tocqueville perceived that business aroused great emotions because it promised
“success.”

Emerson analyzed the virtues and the vices of the businessman in his sketch of Napoleon, that “giant of the
middle class.‘‘(19) Emerson believed that “Bonapart was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree
the qualities and powers of common man.” Napoleon strove for power and wealth “without any scruple as to the means”
(pp. 227-228). He was completely selfish and amoral, scorning ideals, sentiments and affections as baubles “for women and
children” (p. 228). Napoleon sacrificed all ideals of sentiment, intellect, and morality in order to achieve his goals (pp. 223,
and 253), goals identical to the businessman’s, except that Napoleon emphasized power whereas businessmen emphasized wealth
— both “means to a material success” (p. 244) . Emerson found that “the fatal quality,” the treacherous
element in “the pursuit of wealth” was “the breaking or weakening of the sentiments” — until finally a man
who desired to be rich would pursue the end “without any stipulation or scruple concerning the means” (p. 253). Thus
Napoleon “would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dictated” (p. 255). Napoleon’s complete
immorality was also true of the businessman, for the goal of “material success” (p. 224) implicitly denies moral principles
(p. 258).

During the same time that the businessman became a dominant role-model for achievement and success in popular American
culture, two complementary types emerged and were often identified with the businessman. First, the millionaire. Like the word
businessman, millionaire also initially appeared in 1826.(20) By the 1820’s, millionaires were celebrated at death as
heroes of the republic in the public press. No matter how selfish and grasping they may have been, millionaires’ lives and
achievements were generally found praiseworthy.(21) The underlying rationale for the enormous respect accorded the millionaire was
succinctly stated by the Boston intellectual and politician, Edward Everett. In a speech before Boston’s Mercantile Library
Association, 13 September 1838, Everett proclaimed that “No man can promote his own interest without promoting that of
others.“(22) Since the millionaire promoted his own economic interest extraordinarily successfully, he must also have greatly
promoted the general welfare.(23)

The hero worship of the rich — simply because they were rich — is demonstrated by the appearance of
biographical dictionaries devoted to the wealthy. Moses Y. Beach published the first such listings (with estimates of the [page 31:] individuals’ wealth) in 1841. By 1850, two volumes had appeared
listing the wealthy of Philadelphia, three had appeared for Boston, and four for New York24 Without intending any irony, the compilers
sometimes entitled these volumes The Aristocracy of . . . . Finally, to cite a post-Civil War perspective on the
rich, in William Dean Howells’ novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), the reflective hero Basil March analyzes the change
that Jacob Dryfoos has undergone in his transformation from Ohio farmer to New York millionaire and then commeats on the popular appeal
of Dryfoos’ role as millionaire: “That’s the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos’ experience, and I am not very
proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans.“(25)

The second complementary type to achieve popular celebration during the Jacksonian period was the self-made man.(26)
Andrew Jackson, himself an orphan, exemplified the image; and the role itself was thought to fulfill democratic principles.(27) Although
Henry Clay evidently coined the term in 1832,(28) the idea of a self-made man was ancient, and Benjamin Franklin was its best-known
modern example. In 1819, beginning an antislavery piece with a comment on Franklin, Benjamin Rush wrote, “Every Man is said to be
the artificer of his own character.” Horace Greeley found that Franklin stood “highest in the civilized regard” of all
“the men whom the world currency terms Self-Made.“(29) The concept, of course, was commonly applied to the
businessman: in November 1839, Freeman Hunt noted that “Mr. [Joseph Tinker] Buckingham . . . like Mr. [Mathew] Carey, is
the architect of his own fame.“(30) The myth of the log-cabin birth of American presidents attests to America’s attachment
to the role.(31) Calvin Colton, a journalist, politician, and friend of Henry aay, wrote what is probably the best single statement of
the rationale for the ideal of the self-made man:

Ours is a Country, where men stare from an humble origin, and from small beginnings rise gradually in the world, as the reward of
merit and industry, and where they can attain to the most elevated positions, or acquire a large amount of wealth, according to the
pursuits they elect for themselves. No exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment of estates, no civil or political disqualifications,
stand in their path; but one has as good a chance as another, according to his talents, prudence, and personal exertions. — This
is a country of self-mude men, than which nothing better could be said of any state of society.(32)

Colton, like many of his contemporaries, believed that the existence of “self-made” men seemed in itself a justification
of democraq, and conversely, that the tenets of democracy implicitly called for the existence of “self-made” men.

In “The Business Man,” as I will argue below, Poe satirizes these kinds of American popular heroes, and he
does so partially by ridiculing Franklin’s Autobiography, an American literary document widely seen as exemplifying and
justifying not only these models but also the commercial, democratic world-view which defined “success” in terms of them.
The self-proclaimed virtues of Poe’s businessman ironically personify the ills of commercial American society, while the sketch as
a whole constitutes a parody of the numerous praises of the merchant that were appearing [column 2:] in antebellum American
popular literature.(33) Peter Proffit, the autobiographer telling of his path to success in “The Business Man,” reveals
himself to be stupid, opinionated, hypocritical, superstitious, and proud. Although he professes individualism and morality, he is a
conformist and scoundrel who deludes only himself.

II

Although nearly every literate American in the nineteenth century knew Franklin’s life and Autobiography,(34) it is
nevertheless questionable to assume that a specific person had read the Autobiography and knew it well. There is only one direct
reference to the work in Poe’s public writings. Reviewing Robinson Crusoe in the Southern Literary Messenger for
January 1836, Poe characterizes a number of Defoe’s works, adding that An Essay on Projects was “mentioned in terms
of high approbation by our own Franklin” (Complete Works, VIII, 171). The allusion is to Franklin’s testimony in the
Autobiography that An Essay on Projects “perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the
principal future Events of my Life.“(35) Burton R. Pollin has demonstrated that Poe drew this comment on Franklin directly from
prefatory material in the edition of Robinson Crusoe under review.(36) Although this reference tells us nothing about Poe’s
firsthand knowledge of the Autobiography, the text of “The Business Man” proves that Poe both knew the work and
expected his readers to be familiar with it.

Numerous particulars in “The Business Man” recall events and details from the Autobiography.
Poe’s reference to the soap-boiler’s trade (B: 482) in a list of occupations in the sketch may allude to Franklin’s
father’s “Business, which was that of a Tallow Chandler and Sope-Boiler” (A: 7) and to Franklin’s youthful fear
that he was “destin‘d” to “be a Tallow Chandler” (A: 10). Peter Proffit’s refusal of occupations
suggested by his parents (the counting house and the grocery business — B: 483) recalls Franklin’s rejection of a series of
occupations (A: 6-7, 10, 11) suggested by his father. Poe’s reference to “autobiography” (B: 483) may allude to
America’s most famous autobiography. Proffit’s running away from home at age sixteen (B: 483) recalls Franklin’s
celebrated running away to Philadelphia at seventeen (A: 20-25). Proffit’s severe youthful illness (“just touch-and-go for
six weeks — the physicians giving me up and all that sort of thing“ — B: 483) may glance at Franklin’s severe
illness at twenty-one: “My distemper was a Pleurisy, which very nearly carried me off: — I suffered a good deal, gave up the
Point in my own mind, & was rather disappointed when I found my self recovering” (A: 52). Although Poe, like Franklin, was
proud of his feats of swimming,(37) I suspect that when Proffit says “my old habits of system carried me swimmingly
along” (my italics — B: 488), Poe alludes to Franklin’s striking metaphorical use of swimmingly (A: 68, with
the comment “and so full of demnition mischievous as one who creates a large mud puddle and then provides, for a tip, a way to
cross it (B: 488) — as well as his statement that “American streets are so muddy” (B: 490), both recall
Franklin’s concern for cleaning muddy streets (A: [page 32:] 124-125,
126-129), and perhaps remind us of his youthful project for building a pier with the workmen’s stones so that the Boston boys,
when fishing for minnows, would not have to get muddy in a “mere Quagmire” (A: 7). Poe follows his statement that
“American streets are so muddy” with the comment “and so full of demnition mischievous little boys,” and
thereby strengthens the allusion to Franklin’s mischievous childhood project. Proffit’s penultimate project “in
procuring a situation in the Sham-Post” (B: 490) may allude to Franklin’s roles as Philadelphia’s post master and,
later, postmaster general of America (A: 101, 129-130).

Poe’s epigraph “Method is the soul of business” (repeated and echoed throNghout the story) is his own
creation.33 But it not only sounds like something from Poor Richard’s Almanac; it also functions as a direct reference to
the Autobiography and as a degenerate encapsulation of the supposed Franklinian values. Franklin emphasizes method throughout the
Autobiography and urges its application even to the formation of character. Franklin’s systematic chart for spending the
hours of a day (A: 83), his list of thirteen virtues (A: 79-80), and his entire methodical scheme for attaining “moral
perfection” (A: 78-91) all exemplify Franklin’s emphasis on method. Indeed, the statement prefacing his list of virtues is
itself a splendid example of applying method to “the Art of Virtue”: “For this purpose I therefore contriv‘d the
following Method. . . . I propos‘d to myself, for the sake of Clearness, to use rather more Names with fewer Ideas
annex‘d to each, than a few Names with more Ideas; and I included under Thirteen Names of Virtues all that at the time
occur‘d to me as necessary or desirable, and annex‘d to each a short Precept, which fully express‘d the Extent I gave
to its Meaning” (A: 78-79). Of course, order or method is itself Franklin’s third virtue, and he wrote at length of his
efforts to attain “Method,” illustrating his reluctant acceptance of his comparative failure with the anecdote of the
“Speckled Ax” (A: 86-87). Poe reduces the Franklinian virtues to a simple concern with method, and he heightens this
caricature of Franklin’s “moral perfection” by embodying it in a degenerate and hypocritical scoundrel, Peter Proffit.

When Peter Proffit says that “method characterized my actions as well as my accounts” (B: 484), I am
reminded of Franklin’s claiming that he “took care not only to be in Reality Industrious & frugal, but to avoid
all Appearances to the Contrary,” a statement that Franklin illustrated with his anecdote of bringing home paper on a
wheelbarrow (A: 68). Proffit is the epitome and reductio ad absurdum of Franklin’s advice to young men to “always
render Accounts & make Remittances with great Clearness and Punctuality.” According to Franklin, “The Character of
observing Such a Conduct is the most powerful of all Recommendations to new Employments & Increase of Business” (A: 101) . For
Peter Proffit, at least in his own view of himself, embodies perfectly Franklin’s recommended qualities. Proffit tells us “I
got to be well known as a man to be trusted; and this is one-half the battle” (B: [column 2:] 488). And again, “My
strict integrity, economy, and rigorous business habits, here again came into play” (B: 485). Part of Poe’s satire, however,
is that Peter Proffit fails in several enterprises despite (and because of) his attention to method. So, even if one accepts the
morally degenerate business world of Peter Proffit, Franklin’s advice concerning method does not necessarily point the way to
wealth. In satirizing the middle-class virtue of method, Poe repeatedly plays upon the words and concepts of a self-made man and
a made man. Franklin’s Autobiography, of course, still remains the classic account of the life of a self-made man.
Poe seems to allude to Franklin’s account of his rise from rags to riches when Proffit says, “In my case, it was method
— not money which made the man” (B: 484). Poe continues the sentence with a brilliant satirical thrust at the
superficial values implied by the Franklinian order (and his zeugma also satirizes the common cliche “a made man”):
“at least all of him that was not made by the tailor whom I served” (B: 484). At the end of the story, Poe returns to the
cliche, satirizing not only its shallow “clothes” implications, but also the “made man’s” usual tone of
self-satisfaction: “I consider myself, therefore, a made man, and am bargaining for a country seat on the Hudson” (B:
491).(39)

Proffit’s reference to his “Day-book and Ledger” (B: 483) recalls Franklin’s reference to his
journal and accounts (A: 51, 59, 95, 101), especially to his “little Book in which I alloted a Page for each of the Virtues”
(A: 81). Poe’s chart of the account of “Peter Proffit, Walking Advertiser” (B: 484-485) burlesques
Franklin’s use of charts (A: 78-79, 81, 83). And Poe’s use of onehalf a cent in the figures and in the total (and his use of
one-quarter cent in the first version) anticipates Thoreau’s similar satire of materialism and similar use of one-half a cent in
his chart in Walden.(40) At the same time, Poe’s symbolic portrayal of the modern businessman as a tailor’s walking
advertisement, a robot wearing attractive clothing, hauntingly embodies and ridicules both bourgeois materialism and Franklin’s
disregard of man’s spiritual qualities.(41) The ultimate ridicule of the traditional “clothes” philosophy may be found
in Poe’s satire of Proffit as a sandwich man. At the same time, this walking advertiser is a splendid symbol for the
dehumanization of modern man. Just as Emerson in “The American Scholar” (1837) complained of modern men strutting about like
“so many walking monsters — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man”; just as Thoreau in Walden
made clothes the basic quality of the mass of men (“We know but few men, a great mass of coats and breeches”); and just
as Melville in “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) portrays a business world where such inhabitants as Turkey, Nippers, and
Ginger Nut act out their predictable half-lives in a setting “deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life‘”;
so Poe in “The Business Man” presents his own version of modern man as a manikin. “The Business Man” thus
belongs with those stories and poems by Poe that display, in Allen Tate’s words, “the disintegration of the modern
personality.“(42) Indeed, Poe’s symbol of the businessman as nothing but a sandwich man(43) anticipates both Yeats’
haunting lines “An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered [page 33:]
coat upon a stick” and Eliot’s main image in “The Hollow Men.”

It is especially fitting that the first occupation of Poe’s businessman is advertising, a developing profession
that accompanied the rise of mass markets. Advertising prostituted the writer’s sacred word to materialism, and it seemed to
embody the fall of man’s last — and, to some, greatest — ideal to the new vogues of wealth and materialistic progress.
In the increasingly common practice of advertising, the thoughtful man of letters saw that the Republic of Letters — that
Enlightenment ideal which seemed the fulfillment of cultural progress — had become the tool of soulless materialism.(44) In a
related fashion, Poe’s epigraph “Method is the soul of business” slyly reinforces the criticism of American
materialism through its use of the world soul. Poe implies that the Franklinian philosophy reduces man to nothing more than an
entity for business, that is, to a corporation. But even Poe’s scoundrelly caricature of a businessman appreciates a key
difference between real men and corporations, for the latter (and in its first version, Poe’s story ended with these words)
“have neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be damned” (B: 489).

Some aspects of the tone and style of “The Business Man” also seem to mock the Autobiography. Although Franklin
brilliantly counters the major literary sin of the autobiography as a genre, its tendency toward smug self-satisfaction, he occasionally
falls into that posture, an attitude Poe burlesques when Proffit says “hence that positive appetite for system and regularity
which has made me the distinguished man of business that I am” (B: 482). The allusion to Franklin is clearer when Proffit says,
“I will just copy a page or so out of my Day-Book; and this will save me the necessity of blowing my own trumpet — a
contemptible practice, of which no high-minded man will be guilty” (B: 487). Poe here not only satirizes Franklin’s quoting
from his “little Book” (A: 81) and other writings (for example, the Journal Book — A: 51, 59), but also ridicules
Franklin’s repeated advice upon how to keep oneself in the background: “I put my self as much as I could out of sight, and
stated it as a Scheme of a Number of Friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought Lovers of
Reading. In this way my Affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis‘d it on such Occasions; and from my frequent
Successes, can heartily recommend it” (A: 75; compare 90-91) .

Poe thought that “nine-tenths” of maxims and popular proverbs were “the quintessence of folly”
(Complete Works, XI, 65), but, like Franklin, Proffit admires proverbs and sententiae. Besides quoting as an epigraph that
supposed old saying “Method is the soul of business” and echoing it throughout the story, Proffit sententiously opines,
“It’s an old saying and a true one . . . that money is nothing in comparison with health” (B: 488).(45) Poe,
like Thoreau,(46) often undercuts the proverbs, cliches, and biblical allusions he works into his text. The effect is to mock not only
Proffit’s particular use of them, but also the characteristic Franklinian style. Just before Proffit parrots the proverb
“business is business” (B: 485),47 Poe has him echo the [column 2:] common (and usually hypocritical) cliche,
“it’s not the money but the principle of the thing.” Proffit says, “I stood upon the principle of the
thing” (B: 485). But he has no principle except profit. When Proffit condemns “your eccentric fools who prate about method
without understanding it; attending strictly to its letter, and violating its spirit” (B: 482), Poe ironically alludes to 2
Corinthians 3:6 and Romans 7:6 (B: 491 n. 1), while satirizing Franklin’s ostensible concern with “moral perfection”
as well as his practice of biblical allusion. And Poe probably had Franklin’s list of “Virtues” specifically in mind
(especially No. 3, Order or Method — A: 79), as well as Franklin’s entire “bold and arduous Project of arriving at
moral Perfection” (A: 78). While Proffit’s allusion to the Scriptural injunction “Be fruitful and multiply” (B:
491, 492 n. 17) recalls Franklin’s frequently citing the Bible, it may also suggest his well-known advocacy of
philoprogenitiveness; in the the midst of so many other allusions to Franklin, one may even suspect an allusion either to the common
oral reports of Franklin as a lover or to his famous hoax, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker.“48 Of course any association of
Franklin and proverbs recalls Poor Richard’s Almanac (especially the preface which came to be known as “The Way to
Wealth”) and the common practice of quoting Poor Richard’s proverbs (and Franklin’s example) to children. Dennie,
Keats, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, and Lawrence all, as children, chafed at those “mean and thrifty maxims.“49
Evidently Poe did too. And Poe probably again glances at the common habit of quoting proverbs when Proffit attributes his success to
“those stern habits of methodical accuracy which had been thumped into me by that delightful old nurse” (B: 486). Proffit
also repeatedly mentions that he must remember his “old nurse” in his will, so Poe may be alluding to Franklin’s
actual will, which was frequently celebrated because of its charitable legacies.(50)

Peter Proffit’s attack on the man of genius (“the greater the genius the greater the ass“ — B:
482) contains several ironies. Although it alludes to Franklin, whose reputation as the greatest American genius was more widely
celebrated in Poe’s day than now,(51) the attack also satirizes the businessman’s attitude toward the creative genius,
typifying materialist America’s scorn for artists such as Poe.(52) Thus it may be seen as an ironic expression of the romantic
artist’s alienation from middle-class virtues and bourgeois society.(53) Poe may also ruefully have had in mind Franklin’s
statement that he “escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one” because his father told him that poets “were
generally Beggars” (A: 12). Poe was often a beggar, although businessmen who worked in truly “fantastic employments”
and “eccentric pursuits” (B: 482) were often wealthy — and regarded as geniuses by the mob. Poe’s implication
may well be that in any true scheme of values, the poet would be regarded as a genius and rewarded with adequate material success, while
the businessman, as such, would be regarded as an ass. Since Peter Proffit considers any of the following as geniuses — “a
merchant or a manufacturer . . . a dry-goods dealer, or soap-boiler . . . a lawyer, or a blacksmith, or a
physician” (B: 482-483)54 — Poe evidently satirizes the numerous popular articles stressing the [page 34:] universal knowledge and education, that is, the “genius,” that a businessman
must possess.(55) Finally, because Proffit considers these normal occupations to be “fantastic employment” and
“eccentric pursuits” (B: 482) and refers to his “walking advertiser” role as a “decent
occupation” (B: 484) and to his “Eye-Sore” business as an “ordinary” occupation (B: 485), Poe implies
that the only true occupation of a businessman is cheating. In this vision, he is remarkably similar to Emerson’s slightly later
attitude, as well as to one expression of Franklin’s own philosophy.(56)

Although Poe’s numerous direct and indirect allusions to Franklin’s Autobiography amount to a severe
satirical portrait of that classic, there are ambivalent passages within the obvious satire. Poe’s attitudes toward individuals
are notoriously difficult to make out, for those — from Locke to Coleridge and Laplace — whom he heaps with the highest
praise are also those against whom he turns with severest satire. “The Business Man” implies that Poe had carefully read the
Autobiography. When he satirizes Proffit’s exaggerated self-importance, Poe no doubt glances as I have noted, at
Franklin’s self-complacent attitude as it occasionally manifests itself in the Autobiography — and yet, he is also
imitating Franklin’s own ironic satire of the autobiographer’s tendency to think of himself as self-important. In the
burlesque autobiography Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish (1727), Alexander Pope and his contemporaries satirized
autobiographers’ tendency to celebrate themselves. Hawthorne, by referring to the Memoirs in his “The
Custom-House,” reveals that he expects some of his readers to know the book and appreciate his ironic self-depreciation.(57)
Franklin certainly knew it and was convinced of the absurd pride of man. Indeed, nothing in “The Business Man” matches the
depths of irony toward man’s own self-satisfaction revealed by Franklin’s comment that “it would not be quite absurd
if a Man were to thank God for his Vanity among the other Comforts of Life” (A: 2). Thus when Poe satirizes Proffit’s
evident mindless self-satisfaction, he is, on the deepest level, reflecting Franklin’s own satire rather than satirizing him. And,
as Poe evidently knew the Autobiography well, he must have realized that, on one level, he was paying the Autobiography
the greatest flattery — he was imitating it.

One curious passage in “The Business Man” contradicts the ironic and savage authorial voice that
characterizes the tale as a whole. When Poe tells of Proffit’s “CurSpattering” profession (in which a muddy dog rubs
against a dandy’s boots to win a bit of boot-blacking business for Peter Proffit), Poe drifts off into complete fantasy:
“This did moderately well for a time; — in fact I was not avaricious, but my dog was. I allowed him a third of the profit,
but he was advised to insist upon half. This I couldn‘t stand — so we quarreled and parted” (B: 489). When the reader
encounters this passage, he must assume from its tone that Poe is not serious, that the seeming satire in the story is really just a
light-hearted spoof. But this passage was not present in the 1840 version; it concludes the first of the seven paragraphs added in the
1845 text. Perhaps Poe, now enjoying considerable literary fame (although no financial success) as the result of the publication of
[column 2:] “The Gold-Bug” in June 1843 and “The Raven” in January 1845, saw less reason to chafe about
the ideals of “success” in America than he had in 1840. However that may be, the prevailing authorial voice in “The
Business Man,” even in the other six paragraphs added in 1845, is satiric and ironic.

Of course Franklin’s Autobiography is not the only subject of Poe’s satire in “The Business
Man,” nor is it, strictly speaking, his primary satirical target, for Poe’s main concern is to ridicule the materialistic
values and commonplace ideals of antebellum American culture. References in the story to “the frauds of the banks” (B: 489)
and the “Democratic rabble” (B: 490) are not, therefore, merely incidental allusions. Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography provided Poe the most famous literary exemplum of concepts he wished to attack. The Autobiography
burlesqued by Poe is not, of course, the actual Autobiography but an image of it as progenitor of the self-made man, as justifier
of the utilitarian society, as the Autobiography of Poor Richard, and as another version of The Way to Wealth. Poe knew
the more complex Franklin, for he published some of Franklin’s previously unknown essays while editing the Southern Literary
Messenger; and his willingness to refer to “our own” Benjamin Franklin in his only published reference to him suggests
that he, like most Americans of his day, was patriotically proud of the earlier American’s achievements.(58) But Franklin had been
adopted as the patron saint of American businessmen and of “self-made” men by the 1840’s.

Poe draws on the Autobiography in order to satirize such men as Stephen Girard (1750-1831) and John Jacob Astor
(1763-1848), as well as hordes of less famous businessmen, many of whom were publishing autobiographies filled with complacence at their
minor achievements. Besides the business ethic, the self-satisfaction of autobiographers, and the popular journalists, Poe also mocks
the democratic tendencies implicit in the philosophy of the “self-made” man. As I noted above, the radical optimism
concerning the possible achievements of the common man and the jingoistic promises of American wealth were philosophic and
super-patriotic tendencies, celebrated by such popular and opposing politicians as Henry aay, Daniel Webster, and Andrew Jackson.(59)
And like the achievement of wealth, the exalted position of the supposedly self-made man was a common degenerate version of the American
Dream. Poe’s “The Business Man,” I would suggest, ranks among the great satires of the implications of the American
Dream. It is natural that Poe anticipated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in choosing to satirize the American Dream
through its best-known and greatest literary embodiment, Franklin’s Autobiography.(60)

Although Poe’s satire is complex, and although the real Franklin and the actual Autobiography are not Poe’s primary
objects of attack, yet the Autobiography is satirized throughout the story, and I will conclude by listing the most obvious
reasons why. First, since Franklin had been adopted as the patron saint of the American business ethic, an attack on Franklin directly
attacked [page 35:] the business ethic. Second, the romantic and spiritual
tendencies of Poe’s thought run counter to the rationalistic, utilitarian, and pragmatic philosophy of Franklin: for example,
“I began to suspect that this Doctrine [deism] tho’ it might be true, was not very useful” (A: 58). Peter Proffit
is thus a caricature of man without ethics and spirituality — a reductio ad absurdum of an element of Franklin
(Poe also directly attacked Jefferson for his lack of spirituality).(61) Third, Franklin, like almost all other autobiographers, does
sometimes seem self-congratulatory, and Poe satirized him for it. Fourth, Franklin provides an example and, in the fictive world-view of
the Autobiography, a theoretical justification for democracy and the ideal of the self-made man, and Poe uses him as a
whipping-boy for this radical democratic thrust in American society. Fifth, the deliberately optimistic implications of the philosophy
of the Autobiography offended Poe’s view of the actual psychology of individuals, and so he ridicules the shallow,
senselessly optimistic beliefs of Peter Proffit. And last, “The Business Man” satirizes the theme of the American Dream in
the Autohiography, finding that last, best hope for mankind fulfilled in a dehumanized, degenerate version of material success
— the soulless moneygrubbing, diddling, stupid, and dehumanized American businessman, Peter Proffit.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

NOTES

1 - The story first appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1840, with the title “Peter
Pendulum the Business Man.” When Poe revised it for the Broadway Journal, 2 August 1845, he shortened the title, changed
the persona’s name to Peter Proffit, added the final seven paragraphs, and revised a number of details — see Works,
11, 480. Future references to Poe’s “The Business Man” are indicated by the sigla ‘B’ and the page number
in Mabbott’s volume two.

5- Hawthorne, for example, shows that he appreciatff the dominant role of the businessman in mid-nineteenth-century American society
when he writes of one man . . . whose character gave me a new idea of talent.” The businffsman “stood as the ideal
of his class.” The Custom House is Hawthorne’s brilliant ironic symbol for the aggregate of the ideals and customs of his
own society; when Hawthorne calls the businffsman “the Custom-House in himself” and says that he is “thoroughly
adapted to the situation which he held,” Hawthorne is clearly passing judgment upon his society. The Scarlet Letter, ed.
William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962).

7 - The popularity of Franklin’s The Way to Wealth among French intellectuals may be partially explained by its
embodiment of the avant-garde commercial philosophy. In 1792 Joel Barlow splendidly (if hyperbolically) phrased the new
doctrinff: “The men that were formerly dukes and marquesses are now exalted to farmers, manufacturers and merchants“ —
Advice to the Privileged Orders, in The Works of loel Barlow, ed. William K. Bottorff and Arthur L. Ford (Gainesville:
Scholar’s Facsimiliff and Reprints, 1970), 1, 128. For the rise of commercial ideology, see Ralph Lerner, “Commerce and
Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man,” William and Mary Qvarterly, 36 (1979), 3-26.

10 - Sigmund Diamond, The Reputation of the American Businessman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), analyzes the
obituary notices of six businessmen, only two of whom are early enough to be significant indicators of public opinion in Poe’s day
— Stephen Girard (1750-1831) and John Jacob Astor (1763-1848). Glenn Porter and Harold C. Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers:
Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971); and Rush Welter,
The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), “Enterprise,‘’ ch. 6, are both
suggestuve.

14 - Two such titles are Mathew Carey’s Autobiographical Sketches (Philadelphia: John Clarke, [1829]) and George Savage
White, Memoirs of Samuel Slater, the Father of American Manufactures (Philadelphia: no pub., 1836). The Young Merchant
(Philadelphia: R. W. Pomeroy, 1839), variously attributed to John Frost or to R. W. Pomeroy, went through several editions. Alexander
Young, The Good Merchant (Boston: no pub., 1837). [page 36:]

15 - John R. Bodo, The Protestant Clergy and Ps‘61ic Iss?‘es, 18121848 (Princeton: Princeron Univ. Press, 1954).
Henry F. May has commented that the early nineteenth-century teachers of economy in American colleges “might well be labeled
clerical laissez faire‘‘ — Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 14.
“Preach the Gospel,” chapter 7 in Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New
Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 116132, surveys the literature. For a good example, see the Reverend Orville Dewey, Moral
Views of Commerce, Society and Politics (New York: Felt, 1838). W. G. Lyford, The Western Address Directory: Containing the
Cards of Merchants, Manufacturers and Other Business Men (Baltimore: J. Robinson, 1837).

23 - Daniel Boorstin defines the businessman as “a peculiarly American type of community maker and community leader. His
slatting belief was in the interfusing of public and private property.” The Americans: The National Experience, pp.
115-116.

24 - For a bibliography of these books, see Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D.
C. Heath, 1973), p. 347. In 1848, William Armstrong compiled The Aristocracy of New York and Thomas L. Wilson produced The
Aristocracy of Boston.

33 - Besides Freeman Hunt, both Timothy Shay Arthur and Horace Greeley, two more of Poe’s journalist friends, commonly praised
[column 2:] commerce and the businessman. See the DAB sketches of these three, or, better, the biographies of Arthur and
Greeley in Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, Vol. 111 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Joel
Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1979). Of course the periodical press was filled with such praises; see Jerome Thomases,
“Freeman Hunt’s America,‘’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 30 (1943), 395-407. 34The immense
popularity of Franklin’s Autobiography is documented by Paul Leicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography (Brooklyn, N.Y.:
no pub., 1889), nos. 383-546, to which should be added the numerous editions of the Autobiography within Franklin’s
collected works.

35 - Lemay and Zall, eds., Autobiography, p. 11. Subsequent references will be presented in a clear text and indicated by the
sigla “A” within the text.

39 - For the traditional “clothes philosophy,” see ch. 9, “The Wardrobe of a Moral Imagination,” in Paul
Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (New York: Oxford Univ. Prms, 1965), pp. 211-232; or, for details in another
literary work, Elias J. Chiasson, “Swift’s Clothes Philosophy in the Tale and Hooker’s Concept of Law,”
Studies in Philology, 59 (1962), 64-82. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartsus (1836) was the most eminent recent book to make
major use of the traditional clothff philosophy. See James C. Malin, “Carlyle’s Philosophy of Cloth” and
Swedenborg’s,” Scandinavian Studies, 33 (1961), 155-168.

Mabbott points out that mansions on the Hudson were a common symbol of financial success (Works, 11, 493), and I
suspect that Poe knew Freeman Hunt’s popular Letters about the Hsudson River, 3rd ed. (New York: F. Hunt, 1837), pp.
105-108, where the mansion of Col. George P. Morris (another of Poe’s friend-enemies) is described and praised.

41 - From the time of the first known evaluation of the Autobiography (Richard Price’s letter to Franklin, cat 30 May
1790) to the mid-twentieth century, the commonest criticism of the Autobiography has been that Franklin disregarded man’s
spiritual qualities. Times change. A late twentieth-century critic faults Franklin for not being as atheistic as Voltaire — Karl
J. Weintraub, “The Puritan Ethic and Benjamin Franklin,” losurnal of Religion, 56 (1976), 223-237, esp. p. 236.

43 - Poe does not use the term. The earliest record of “sandwich man” is in John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary,
3rd ed. (London: Hotten, 1864), p. 219, although Dickens adumbrated the expression in his Sketches by Boz (1836), p. ix:
“an animated sandwich composed of a boy between two boards.”

44 - See Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1963), for an extended discussion of
“puffing” and of Poe’s attitude toward this practice of writing advertising in the guise of book reviewing. [page 37:]

45 - Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, p. 362.

46 - In Poor Richard for 1735, Franklin wrote “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and
wise,” and he used the proverb again in The Way to Wealth — The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al.
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959-), II, 9; VII, 342. Compare Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, p. 211. In Walden, Thoreau writes
“Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably
healthy, wealthy, and wise?“ — p. 127. For a shrewd analysis of Thoreau’s use of proverbs and cliches, see Joseph J.
Moldenhauer, “The Rhetorical Function of Proverbs in Walden,” Journal of American Folklore 80 (1967), 151-159.

47 - Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, p. 93.

48 - Although not printed in the early editions of Franklin’s works, “The Speech” was widely published in
periodicals, and Franklin’s authorship was known by a number of American men of letters. Poe even had the scholarly satisfaction
of informing the great Franklin scholar Jared Sparks that the jeu d‘esprit signed “Celia Single” was an authentic
Franklin piece — Letters, 1, 91. As a result of Poe’s letter, Sparks added a “Supplement” to The Works of
Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1836), 11, 523557, reprinting the Franklin manuscripts which William Duane, Jr.,
possessed, and which Poe had just published in the Southern Literary Messenger. See also The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
I 240-243; and, for “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” III, 120-125. Max Hall, Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker: The
History of a Literary Deception (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1960) traces the eighteenth-century popularity of
“The Speech.” A few further references to its popularity are found in J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Text, Rhetorical
Strategies, and Themes of ‘The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,‘” The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin,
ed. Lemay (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 115.

49 - The words are by Keats — Letters of John Keats, ed. Sidney Colvin (London: Macmillan, 1918), p. 175. For Joseph
Dennie’s denigration (which Leigh Hunt echoed) of Franklin’s “scoundrel maxim,” see Lewis Leary, “Joseph
Dennie on Benjamin Franklin: A Note on Early American Literary Criticism,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 72
(1948) 240-246. For Thoreau see n. 41. Melville called Franklin a “maxim-monger” in Israel Potter, ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library, 1982), p. 48. And Mark
Twain’s entire spoof, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy, 10 (1870), 138-140, ostensibly proves that “His
maxims were full of animosity toward boys.” For Lawrence, see n. 6. In his Biographical Stories for Children, Hawthorne has Mr.
Temple answer his son’s question “Why should he have grown so famous?” with the reply that “Poor Richard’s
Almanac did more than anything else, towards making him familiarly known to the public.” The child Edward replies “I have
read some of those proverbs . . . but I do not like them. They ate all about getting money or saving it“ — True
Stories from History and Biography (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press 1972), pp. 273-274.

50 - Franklin left bequests to the schools of Boston, to the Pennsylvania Hospital, and to young tradesmen of Boston and Philadelphia.
Typically, Mason Locke Weems praises the will in The Life of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: U. Hunt, 1835), pp. 232233.

51 - Several good essays have been devoted to Franklin’s reputation: William Macdonald, “The Fame of Franklin,”
Atlantic Monthly 96 (1905), 451-462; Dixon Wecter, “Poor Richard: The Boy Who Made Good,” in his The Hero in
America: A Chronical of Hero Worship (New York: Scribner’s, 1941), pp. 50-80 and 495-497; Louis B. Wright, “Franklin’s
Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 22 (1946), 268-279; Robert E. Spiller, “Franklin on the Art of
Being Human,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100 (1956), 304-315; and Richard D. Miles, “The American
Image of Benjamin Franklin,” American Qvarterly, 9 (1957), 117-143.

52 - Poe wrote that he “should be inclined to rank John Neal first, or at all events second [that is, Poe himself was first]
among our men of indisputable genius.” Since Poe’s satire in “The Business [column 2:] Man” is directed
at democracy, as well as American materialism, it is noteworthy that Poe continues his serious remarks on Americans “of
indisputable genius” with the question, “Is it, or is it not a fact that the air of Democracy agrees better with mere
talent than with Genius“ — Complete Works, XVI, 152.

53 - In view of the alienation of French artists and intellectuals, it is only fitting that Poe’s French audience was
particularly sensitive to his alienation from bourgeois values. Baudelaire remarked, ‘The man of letters is the world’s
enemy“ — The Essence of Laughter and Other Essays (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 188. For the development of
intellectual alienation in America, see Lewis P. Simpson, “The Southern Writer and the Great Literary Secession,” in The
Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays in the History of the Literary Vocation in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State Univ. Press, 1973), esp. pp. 230-235. See also Simpson’s “Slavery and the Culture of Alienation,” in The
Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975), pp. 3464. I trust that in
commenting on Poe’s alienation, I will not seem to side with those critics who have found that Poe was “Out of Space —
Out of Time”; for in being alienated, he was very much a man of his time. As Marshall McLuhan has written, “it was
from the experience of the Virginia of his day that Poe was able to project those symbols of alienation and inner conflict which won the
immediate assent of Baudelaire himself“ — McLuhan, “Edgar Poe’s Tradition,” in The Interior Landscape:
The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, ed. Eugene McNamara (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 217.

54 - Neither the soap-boiler nor the blacksmith belong in this catalogue of professionals and businessmen. I have pointed out that the
soap-boiler probably alludes to Franklin. The blacksmith may also, for Franklin’s family had traditionally been blacksmiths (A:
3). Weems says, “for three hundred years the eldest son . . . was invariably brought up a blacksmith‘‘
— The Life of Benjamin Franklin, p. 6.

55 - See above, nn. 11 and 33.

56 - For Emerson, see Part 1. On 4 April 1769, Franklin wrote that there were “but three Ways for a Nation to Acquire
Wealth,” by “War which is robbery”; “Commerce which is generally Cheating”; and “by
Agriculture the only honest Way“ — The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, XVI, 109.

57 - The Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish first appeared in the Swift-Pope Miscellanies in Prose and Verse
(London, 1727) and satirized the first volume of Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Times (London, 1724). The
Scarlet Letter, p. 3.

58 - Letters, 1, 91. See also n. 35 above. Poe may glance at Franklin in “Loss of Breath” when he refers to the
“originator” of lightning-rods (Works, 11, 71).

59 - Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, pp. 43-45.

60 - Interesting treatments of the theme of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby may be found in Floyd C. Watkins,
“Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatz and Young Ben Franklin,” New England Quarterly, 27 (1954), 249-252; Richard D. Lehan,
“Focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: The Nowhere Hero,” in American Dreams, American
Nightmares, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 106-114; and Brian M. Barbour, “The
Great Gatsby and the American Past,” Southern Review, 9 (1973), 288-299.

61 - Poe wrote that the Act for the Establishment of Religious Freedom was one of Jefferson’s “iniquities“
— Complete Works, VII, 250. For the Act, see The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al.
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950), 11, 545553. Poe may have attacked Franklin’s lack of spirituality in an earlier
satire, “King Pest,” where two drunken, irresponsible sailors iconoclastically break the ban and risk catching and spreading
the plague “to the crew of the ‘Free and Easy‘” (Works, 1, 240, 254). Franklin’s new religious
society was to be entitled the “Society of the Free and Easy” (A: 93). Poe’s allusion identifies
Franklin’s new religion with the grotesque violation of society enacted by the two sailors. But it is possible either that the
“Free and Easy” was the name of a Philadelphia bar or that Poe was alluding to Neal’s Charcoal Sketches (see n.
2), for Pedrigo Pumpilion in Neal’s sketch “‘Tis Only My Husband” hangs out at “the ‘free and
easies‘” before his marriage (p. 27).